Meet Ethan Gelber

Ethan, BikeAbout's founder and president, is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (with a Masters in International Education and Cross-cultural Communication). He learned about education, technology, and bicycle travel during his six years helping to establish, manage, and guide for Blue Marble Travel, a European bicycle tourism company. A native of New York City, Ethan has taught Humanities at an inner-city alternative high school that he helped open and design the curriculum for. He has also worked for UNESCO, the American Council of Learned Societies, and different educational and regional research institutes associated with Columbia University. Ethan has toured extensively, often by bicycle, in Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. He speaks fluent French, functional Italian and Spanish, and sloppy German. Since the BikeAbout–the Mediterranean journey, in addition to his work for BikeAbout, he has moonlighted as a writer, editor, project manager, and translator, most recently for GORP.com, Lonely Planet Publications, the French Government Tourist Office in New York (as publications manager and editor of its FranceGuide magazine in 2004 and 2005), and now the Starlight Children's Foundation in Australia, for whom he coordinated the Tour de Kids. After a year living in Sri Lanka (September 2004 to September 2005), where he worked as an alternative tourism consultant and wrote for, among others, Lonely Planet (again) and Travel Sri Lanka magazine, he has moved to Sydney, Australia. Click here if you would like to read about his travels in 2002 and 2003.